


Molecular

by LittleSammy



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-21
Updated: 2012-04-21
Packaged: 2017-11-04 02:14:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/388571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleSammy/pseuds/LittleSammy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Abby watches too many BBC documentaries, McGee clearly doesn't, and Tony and Ziva do it like they do on the Discovery Channel. (And it's not what you think right now.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Molecular

**Author's Note:**

> thanks: To LouC, whose wacky facts prompt accidentally gave me the solution for one of the biggest canon mysteries. And to Sir David Attenborough, who made that fact sound incredibly sexy.

"Damn," McGee mutters. "Now I need to get _that_ image out of my head, too." Abby laughs while he rubs his eyes with a moan. "Where's Tony with the refills, anyway?"

Ziva turns her head, and from the way she moves, just slightly off and no longer quite as gracefully as usual, he can tell that she is almost toasted enough now to drop off her chair.

"Bar," she says and gives a short bark of laughter. "Sticking to the waitress like a gecko to a wall."

McGee follows the direction of her gaze and watches Tony in the kind of aggressive full flirtation mode that never gets him anywhere. Tim's eyes flick back to Ziva, and the sudden fondness clearly visible in her face while she keeps watching Tony throws him off for a moment. 

He's pretty sure she didn't mean for them to see that she has a soft spot for the self-proclaimed team clown, and that's not really the part that matters. It's not like they didn't all know already about that, just like they all know that sometimes Tony looks at her pretty much the same way, even though he doesn't have to be nearly as drunk as Ziva for that to happen. 

That's not the confusing part. The thing that really rattles McGee's brain is that he suddenly asks himself how she can do that. How she can watch Tony flirt his ass off with every other woman and still look at him as fondly as a proud mom watching her firstborn fooling around at the playground.

He is pretty sure they're not sleeping together, so yes, technically he knows that Ziva wouldn't have any right to act jealous, really. But he is also pretty sure that there _are_ some strong feelings between them, and he has already watched Tony make an ass out of himself every time he thought Ziva was dating someone or even just flirting with a guy. 

So, when Ziva now looks at Tony that certain way, not flustered at all by him sticking to another woman, but rather looking like she's thinking about ruffling his hair and giving him a cookie, his brain simply doesn't compute. Even with Abby, even after all these years of moving on, McGee still can't help feeling possessive every now and then, and since Ziva doesn't strike him as someone who is good at sharing - at least when non-food is concerned - it confuses the heck out of him.

He turns his head to see if Tony has been slapped yet and watches him extend his hand to touch the waitress's arm. She frowns at him and turns away, and Tony's sticky gecko fingers hover in the air for a second before he laughs, shakes his head and grabs their beers instead.

"Gecko," McGee repeats, and to his horror a drunken little giggle attaches itself to the word. "I had a pet gecko as a kid."

"For some reason that doesn't surprise me," Abby snickers and steals pretzels from his side of the table. 

"What?" he huffs and gets defensive. "Hairy pets were out because I had some serious allergies going on. And Frenchie was a pretty cool pet--"

"'Frenchie'?" Ziva snorts, and he gives her a glare.

"... with her little sucky feet--" he continues, and Abby gasps in shock and clutches her heart.

"Mc _Gee!_ " she exclaims in utter shock, and he turns his head to look at her, confusion showing clearly on his face. "I can forgive Ziva the science failure, because she's Ziva, obviously, but _you?_ "

"Hey!" Ziva protests but settles for a self-aware pout when Abby just raises one of her eyebrows at her.

"What did I do?" McGee asks, and Abby's glare hits him full force.

"'Sucky feet'?" she repeats accusingly, and he frowns, still not getting it.

"She stuck to _glass_ , Abby."

Abby leans back in her chair and crosses her arms in front of her chest. Her chin goes up while she just says "Van der Waals interaction." ominously, which makes McGee's eyebrows rise.

"Really? I didn't know that."

"Whoa," Ziva interrupts them, her head going back and forth between them. A frown of heavy concentration is suddenly stuck to her face, and McGee would never admit that out loud but he thinks it's incredibly cute on her. "If you do need to talk science for the mood, at least do it so a normal person understands you."

He glances at Abby just in time to see her blink, and he knows that she's wondering who those normal persons are Ziva is talking about. Still, she learns towards the Israeli in her seat, and while she explains more Discovery Channel-like, her voice takes on that certain Attenborough quality that McGee has always found incredibly hot. Only on her, though, not on Attenborough himself.

"A gecko's foot is covered in half a million hairs called setae," she says, and for a second McGee thinks that she has lost Ziva already with that line. "Each is much, much finer than human hair, and at the tip of each hair sit even finer hairs that are sometimes just the width of a single amino acid molecule."

She sees Ziva blink slowly and adds, "We are all made out of amino acids, and they sort of... they have an interaction going on, like humans, you see? Some attract each other, some repel each other. Like, if the cells of your body suddenly started repelling instead of attracting..."

"Urgh," Ziva says, and Abby nods, almost excited that her student is still following.

"So when a gecko climbs up a wall, there are intermolecular forces at work. His tiny, tiny hairs--"

"Attract the wall?" Ziva offers, and McGee's mouth does a stupefied downward slide when Abby nods again.

"Yes! The molecules of both the gecko and the surface become charged and are attracted to one another, and they... they just _bond_ , you know? It's a whole new level of intimacy, almost like a... a molecular embrace," she sighs. She clutches her chest again, this time in happiness, basking in the very idea of a molecular-level romance. McGee wonders if it's just because he's a nerd that he thinks her physics talk suddenly sounds decidedly like sex. 

"What did I miss?" Tony says, handing out beers, and Ziva tilts her head back to look up at him, that same creepy adoration fluttering across her face again briefly before she gets a grip and turns it down to a mere smile.

"Science talk," she replies while she takes her beer from Tony, whose hand brushes her bare neck and comes to rest there. Neither of them seems to really notice that, and McGee blinks. "Oh, and McGee had a gecko named Frenchie once."

Tony starts to snicker, opening his mouth to comment, and McGee just glares at him. "Don't go there, Tony," he warns, and DiNozzo grins at him widely.

"Hey, I just hope she lived up to her name," he says in fake innocence. 

Ziva snorts into her beer, then smacks her lips and stares at the label. "Non-alcoholic?" she mutters and turns a heavy frown on DiNozzo, who flops down beside her, but keeps his hand to her neck.

"Yeah," he shrugs. "You're wasted already, don't want to carry you home."

Her eyes narrow and she puts down her beer in front of Tony, then tries to grab his. DiNozzo laughs and evades the move but Ziva is clearly on a mission now, and while they start a wrestling match over the real alcohol, McGee blinks as he suddenly watches some heavy van der Waals action going on between them.

And suddenly he gets why Ziva isn't flustered at all by Tony trying to go after every other woman. She doesn't have to. His amino acids are just right for her, and he touches _her_ all differently. He doesn't stick, and he certainly doesn't repel, and there's no need for her to be worried because they have this whole molecular level thing going on, and that's hard to beat.

McGee leans back and watches them, oblivious to the fact that he stares. For a heartbeat, he can't help feeling deeply envious, and he tries not to let it show while Ziva holds on to Tony's beer and Tony holds on to Ziva, his setae bonding with her surface.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I'm Sammy, and I'm a proud nerd. Feel free to throw wacky facts at me. Some even might turn into a story. ^^


End file.
